NEW ORLEANS — Just because the lights went down in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in the middle of Super Bowl XLVII, New Orleans won’t be held in the dark for future title games. After thanking the Crescent City for being a wonderful host for the 10th time in championship game’s storied 47 years, commissioner Roger Goodell made that clear on Monday.

“We want to be back in New Orleans,” Goodell said. “We will be back in New Orleans.”

Says Roger Goodell of another Super Bowl in the Big Easy: “We want to back in New Orleans. We will be back in New Orleans.”

When the power outage happened early in the third quarter of Sunday’s game, eventually won 34-31 by the Ravens over the 49ers in the longest Super Bowl ever (4 hours, 14 minutes), it was met with initial shock by everyone in the venerable 38-year-old building. But in the end, it was only a 34-minute delay and didn’t keep the game from ending with an exciting finish on the field.

According to Goodell, it also doesn’t change the perception of the Superdome and other older venues as being capable to host a major sporting event. And it shouldn’t. While the league is performing “root cause analysis” to find out what happened on Sunday to help prevent similar future situations.

Superdome official Doug Thornton, the man responsible for successful $336 million in renovations to bring the stadium back to Super Bowl standards since the damage of Hurricane Katrina in 2006, addressed reports on Sunday’s fallout.

“After all we’ve been through here in New Orleans, it seems like we can’t escape that worldwide attention in these kinds of events,” Thornton said. “It was an unfortunate circumstance in such a great moment for the city. The city was spectacular this week, the host committee did a great job and it was a flawless event to that point.

“I’m very disappointed that it happened.”

Thornton also said an inadvertent fire alarm tripped in the press box was unrelated to the outage. The halftime show was “running on 100 percent generated power, and wasn’t on the power grid at all.”

An NFL spokesman followed up to say that all the usual backup sources were in place, and the outage was followed up by the necessary measures to ensure safety of all those in the stadium.

The Superdome is used to hosting events nearly as big as the Super Bowl, including Sugar Bowls, BCS championship games and Final Fours. But the Super Bowl is much more than about the stadium in which the game is played.

New Orleans is a warm, welcoming community and it deserved the opportunity to rise as a great Super Bowl venue again. The city welcomed the league, the media, the Ravens, the 49ers and football fans and showed them a great time all week.

The same will be true of New York/New Jersey next year. The focus there has been whether an outdoor Super Bowl in cold weather will fly. The game will still be played, and played well. It will be the culmination of an event, not the entire event.

There’s a natural tendency to focus on something that could go wrong, and in New Orleans’ case, did go wrong. But it’s more how about how quickly things get right. When you’re dealing with restoring power on such a large scale, recovering after just 34 minutes should be seen as a positive. After all, recovering is what New Orleans does best.